Fact-Check — Guns & Mass Shootings

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun — a maxim so powerful it has now been tested against several hundred actual mass shootings with results we prefer not to compile into a table. At Uvalde, there were 376 good guys with guns. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed while the good guys assembled in the hallway. This is either a failure of the theory or a failure of those particular good guys, and we are firmly choosing the latter interpretation, as it preserves the theory. The Club Q shooter was stopped by an unarmed Army veteran and a trans woman in heels, which, in the spirit of good-guy-with-a-gun theory, we are reclassifying as an alternative delivery mechanism for the underlying principle, specifically: the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is someone physically present who is willing to act, regardless of whether they are armed, which is the same thing we have been saying all along except without the gun, which was the entire point, but let’s move on.

Thoughts and prayers are a powerful and evidence-based public safety intervention — a conclusion we hold firmly despite the absence of a single study demonstrating any reduction in mass shootings attributable to congressional prayer, a data gap we attribute to the CDC’s well-known liberal bias and its shameful refusal to study this, which 216 House Republicans corrected by voting to defund CDC gun research, thereby ensuring the study can never be done, thereby ensuring our position can never be disproven, which is just good science. After every mass shooting, Republicans correctly note that it is not the time to discuss policy. There is also not a time before a mass shooting to discuss policy, because we don’t know when the next one will be. And after the grief fades, the moment has passed. This scheduling system has successfully prevented any meaningful gun legislation since 1994, which we offer not as a criticism but as a demonstration of its effectiveness as a strategy.

The Second Amendment says “shall not be infringed” — four words that mean the right is absolute and no regulation is constitutional, a reading we maintain even though Justice Scalia, the most celebrated conservative jurist of the modern era, explicitly wrote in the same decision that it is not absolute and listed specific permissible regulations, which we consider a deeply unfortunate sentence that we are choosing to ignore on the grounds that it appears in a ruling we otherwise cite as the definitive authority on this subject. The Founders, who wrote the Second Amendment, also wrote Militia Acts requiring gun registration and specifying permitted firearms, which proves either that the Founders believed in reasonable regulation or that historical evidence should be applied selectively, and we are choosing the second option, which is the same approach we use for the rest of the Constitution when it produces results we like.

More guns make society safer — a theory that has been most thoroughly tested in the United States, which has more guns per capita than any country on Earth and a gun homicide rate 26 times higher than peer nations, a combination of facts that either disproves the theory or means we simply don’t have enough guns yet. America has approximately 400 million civilian-owned firearms. The Libs say this results in 40,000+ gun deaths per year. We say those deaths would have been even higher without the guns, a claim impossible to verify but equally impossible to disprove, which makes it an excellent foundation for policy. Japan has approximately 0.3 guns per 100 people and approximately 10 gun deaths per year. Japan’s approach would not work in America because of cultural differences, specifically that Americans have 400 million guns and therefore the cultural differences argument is circular but we’re on a deadline.

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people — a logical framework that, if extended consistently, would mean that cars don’t cause car accidents (people do), cigarettes don’t cause cancer (smokers do), and drunk driving laws are unconstitutional violations of the freedom of people who happen to be operating a vehicle while intoxicated. We do not extend the framework consistently. We apply it only to guns because guns are in the Second Amendment and drunk driving is not. The Dayton shooter killed 9 people in 32 seconds; the Libs note that this rate of efficiency is difficult to achieve with a different instrument. We say the problem is the person, not the instrument, and then propose no policy regarding the person either, leaving us with a situation where neither the person nor the instrument is addressed, which is also fine.

Mental health is the real cause of mass shootings, and we are deeply committed to addressing it — a commitment demonstrated by our decades-long opposition to Medicaid expansion, which would have funded mental health care for millions of uninsured Americans, our votes to cut mental health spending, our repeal of the ACA requirement for mental health parity in insurance coverage, and, in the case of Governor Abbott, a $211 million mental health budget cut executed within days of blaming mental health for Uvalde. Our commitment to addressing mental health is an argument we make immediately after shootings and then quietly set aside until the next one. It is worth noting that every country has people with mental illness. The U.S. is the only country with daily mass shootings. We have looked at this data and concluded that the variable to address is mental health, not the other variable that differs between the U.S. and every other country on Earth.

The AR-15 is a common sporting and hunting rifle that poses no special danger compared to any other firearm, which is why the United States military designed it, adopted it as their primary infantry weapon, and has used it in every conflict since Vietnam — presumably because of how good it is for deer. The “AR” stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” not “Assault Rifle,” a clarification that gun advocates make at every possible opportunity, as though the name resolves the underlying question of what it was designed to do, which is to shoot a large number of people very quickly, which it does extremely well whether you call it an assault rifle or a sporting rifle or Gerald. Trauma surgeons who treat victims of AR-15 wounds have described the injuries as categorically different from handgun wounds and almost unrecognizable compared to typical emergency room trauma. We consider their testimony emotional and inadmissible.

We must arm teachers because placing more guns in schools is the obvious response to the presence of guns in schools — a solution so clear that it has been proposed after every school shooting since Sandy Hook without the intervening decade of armed teachers producing a single documented case where a teacher stopped a mass shooter, which may simply mean the shooters are still intimidated and choosing softer targets like schools with no armed teachers, except those schools also keep getting shot up, but by different shooters, which proves the specific teachers at those schools were not armed, which is why the teachers at those schools need to be armed, which is the solution we proposed. Texas passed a law in 2019 allowing teachers to carry firearms in schools. There was a school shooting in Texas with 21 victims three years later. We have identified the problem: not enough teachers were carrying. The solution is more teachers carrying. We are confident in this analysis.

Gun-free zones attract mass shooters because criminals obey gun-free zone signs — a premise that simultaneously requires us to believe that someone planning to commit mass murder will nonetheless comply with a posted notice, which is exactly the level of policy-responsiveness we attribute to people in the grip of homicidal ideation. The Las Vegas shooter was on the 32nd floor of a hotel. There were almost certainly armed people in the crowd of 22,000 below. None were able to return fire at a man with a rifle a third of a mile away behind a window. This proves the crowd needed more guns, specifically guns capable of accurately engaging a target 1,000 feet above street level through hotel glass at night, which is a description of military sniper equipment, which some of us would also like to own, and which we are getting to.

Background checks are a government registry that will lead directly to confiscation — even though NICS records are legally required to be destroyed within 24 hours of approval, which makes them the world’s least useful registry, as you cannot confiscate guns from a list that no longer exists, but which we treat as the first step toward tyranny on the grounds that the government could simply choose to start keeping the records it is currently prohibited from keeping, which is true of virtually any privacy protection and is therefore an argument against all privacy protections, a conclusion we are not yet ready to make publicly. Approximately 90% of Americans support universal background checks. Republican politicians have blocked universal background check legislation at every opportunity. We consider this a demonstration of principled leadership against the 90% majority, which we are protecting from itself.

Alex Jones said Sandy Hook was staged for years, building a media empire partly on the claim, selling supplements to an audience primed by the outrage, and directing that audience toward the home addresses of parents whose children had been shot to death, after which those parents spent a decade being harassed and threatened, after which Alex Jones was sued, after which he admitted in a deposition that the shooting was “100% real,” after which juries awarded the families approximately $1.5 billion in damages, after which Jones filed for bankruptcy. Reflecting on this sequence of events, we note that Jones apologized, that the families showed considerable grace, and that the $1.5 billion judgment suggests courts take a dim view of broadcasting the home addresses of grieving parents for profit. Jones’s admission that it was real also resolves the factual question. We are choosing to lead with this context rather than the original claim out of respect for the families and a preference to not revisit arguments that cost their originator $1.5 billion.

Red flag laws allow the government to take your guns based on a neighbor’s complaint with no evidence, no trial, and no due process — a description of a policy that actually requires: a petition, a judge, documented evidence of imminent danger, a court order, a subsequent hearing, and a right to contest the removal, all of which are due process, but which we are characterizing as “no due process” because the process happens quickly. Our concern is that someone could make a false report. This is a legitimate concern that applies equally to every restraining order, every arrest, every search warrant, and every other legal mechanism humans have developed for responding to imminent danger before it occurs, and which we oppose specifically in the case of guns and specifically not in the case of those other mechanisms. We are not yet prepared to explain why the gun version uniquely lacks procedural legitimacy, but we feel strongly about it and will let you know when the explanation arrives.

The CDC should not research gun violence because research might produce findings, and findings might support policy, and policy might involve guns, and we have decided in advance that no gun policy is acceptable, making the research a threat not because of what it might find but because of what we might have to do with it, which is an unusual but internally consistent approach to scientific inquiry that we believe the Enlightenment would have also adopted if it had thought things through more carefully. Jay Dickey, the congressman who authored the research ban, later publicly stated he regretted it and that the research should have continued. We are not adopting his updated position as he is no longer useful to our argument in his revised form. The CDC researches car accidents, heart disease, tobacco, workplace injuries, and every other significant cause of American death. We are not concerned about any of those research programs. We cannot explain why gun violence is the one cause of death that becomes more dangerous the more you study it.

Stand Your Ground laws are applied equally regardless of race — confirmed by data showing that cases where white shooters kill Black victims are deemed justifiable four times more often than the reverse, which we interpret as equal because both situations are technically covered by the same law, and if the outcomes are dramatically different, that reflects the individual circumstances of each case rather than any pattern, and pointing out the pattern is the real racism because it implies white people are advantaged by a system that advantages white people, which is circular reasoning that we are fine with on this particular occasion. Stand Your Ground was applied in the Trayvon Martin case. Trayvon Martin was 17 years old, unarmed, and walking home from a convenience store. The principle of standing one’s ground against an unarmed teenager carrying iced tea and Skittles is one we find legally defensible and also find it best not to examine further.

Gun violence is a Chicago problem, which proves that strict gun laws don’t work, which proves we need no gun laws anywhere — a syllogism that skips over the part where 60% of crime guns in Chicago were originally purchased in neighboring states with weaker laws, meaning Chicago’s strict laws are being undermined by the exact absence of gun laws that we are advocating for as a solution to Chicago’s gun problem. We are the pipeline. We are citing the outcome of our own policy as proof our policy should continue. The states with the highest gun homicide rates per capita are Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — Republican-governed, rural states with very permissive gun laws — but we are not citing those states as proof that permissive gun laws don’t work, because they are not Chicago, and Chicago is the only valid data point in this conversation.

The Founders intended citizens to be armed with the most powerful weapons available so they could resist government tyranny — a purpose that requires continuous escalation as government weapons improve, meaning citizens today would need tanks, attack helicopters, and tactical nuclear weapons to maintain parity with the federal government, a position the most committed Second Amendment advocates have not yet taken publicly but which is the logical conclusion of the argument and which we are watching with interest. The Founders wrote the Second Amendment while personally owning enslaved human beings — a detail that, when raised, causes Second Amendment advocates to note that we should not judge the Founders by modern standards. We agree completely. This principle applies selectively to their firearms opinions and not to their opinions on other matters, the selective application of which is left as an exercise for the reader.

The Uvalde school shooting was caused by too many doors, identified by Texas official Don McLaughlin within hours of the event — a rapid investigative conclusion reached before any forensic analysis, before most of the bodies had been removed, and before any door-specific inquiry had been conducted, suggesting either exceptional analytical speed or a pre-prepared alternative explanation. The proposed solution — limiting schools to a single entrance and exit — would ensure that in any future fire, gas leak, or emergency requiring evacuation of hundreds of children, they would be channeled through one bottleneck, which we are confident the 376 officers who couldn’t enter through multiple existing doors would navigate with the efficiency they displayed on May 24, 2022. We believe the Libs will immediately point out that the problem was the gun, to which we respond: doors. We have made our position clear.

Mass shootings are the price of freedom — a price paid primarily by children, concert-goers, grocery shoppers, churchgoers, nightclub patrons, and other Americans going about their daily lives rather than by the politicians who set the price and pay nothing personally, which is an equitable arrangement that the free market of ideas has ratified through decades of election cycles in which these politicians continue to be re-elected, demonstrating that Americans broadly accept this price structure. Australian children do not practice active shooter drills. German children do not practice active shooter drills. British, Canadian, Japanese, and New Zealand children do not practice active shooter drills. American children do practice active shooter drills. We consider this evidence of American exceptionalism and not, as critics suggest, evidence that America has a uniquely dangerous problem it has chosen not to address. The drills teach resilience. We are very proud of our children’s resilience. We have given them a great deal of opportunity to develop it.

A gun in the home makes your family safer — confirmed by our strong feelings about this and contradicted by research published in peer-reviewed medical journals, which we have already established is produced by scientists trying to kill us all, so we are discounting it. The research finds that guns in homes are more commonly used in suicides, domestic homicides, and accidental shootings than in defensive uses, which we counter by noting that no one ever broke into our house, and we attribute this to the deterrent effect of gun ownership and not to the base rate at which houses are broken into, which is low regardless of gun ownership. 4.6 million children live with a loaded, unsecured gun. One in three children who shoot someone accidentally is five years old or younger. These statistics describe a population of five-year-olds who found loaded firearms. We decline to draw any policy conclusions from this and instead suggest the parents take a safety course, which is government overreach unless we are proposing it as an alternative to regulation, in which case it is common sense.

Now is not the right time to discuss gun control because we are still grieving — a sentiment that recurs approximately every 72 hours based on the current pace of mass shootings, creating a continuous state of grief that permanently forecloses policy discussion, which is not a deliberate strategy but rather an organic emotional response that happens to produce the same legislative outcome as a deliberate strategy, specifically: nothing. Trump told the NRA that during his first term “we did nothing” on guns, “we didn’t yield,” which he offered as an accomplishment at a gun rights forum to sustained applause, which is a frank description of the legislative record that most gun rights advocates prefer to describe as principled constitutionalism rather than “we did nothing,” but which produced the same result either way. We stand by our thoughts. We stand by our prayers. We look forward to offering both again very soon.